We’ll soon be paying £6 a gallon for petrol: Six quid! If you’re my age, you’ll remember the collective disbelief when it reached £1.
This piece of news reminded me how meaningless petrol pumps have become since the switch to litres. I have no immediate grasp of what a litre is: my brain is wired to recognize and deal with pints, quarts and gallons.
It’s warm today – well, by my standards, at least. According to the BBC weather site, it’s about 16º outside. That’ll rise to 18º by 4pm, it predicts. I have no idea what either of those figures means: they could substitute Egyptian hieroglyphics for all the difference it would make. They could say, “It’s dimmity-dreeve now and it’ll rise to splodgety-thwank later.” All I know is that it’ll be hotter this afternoon than it is now, which, unless meaningfully quantifed, is not a massively useful piece of information.
On the BBC website, by accessing something called “My Weather”, you can switch the measurement units to Farenheit. I’ve just done so, and suddenly I’ve donned cognitive spectacles. I know exactly what’s going on. Or, at least, what’s supposed to be going on. I seriously doubt if it’s really only 61º at the moment – feels closer to 70 – but, then, my east-facing office doesn’t half catch the sun in the morning. But at least I know what the Met office thinks the temperature should be, and that when I venture outside this afternoon, I won’t need to wrap up.
I was in my early twenties when the switch to decimalized currency was made, so it wasn’t that painful (although I resented it like mad, mainly because it was imposed during the reign of that ghastly man, Ted Heath, and came about simply because of his obsession with dragging us into Europe). But my mother’s generation had a horrible time making the switch, and, to be honest, it took me a decade to stop having to mentally convert 62.5p into 12s 6d.
When it comes to speed, distance and height, we still - generally - use feet, inches, yards and miles: the bloke next door is 6’6” tall, not 1.9812 metres, and it’s about 220 miles from here to Cornwall, not 354 kilometres. Speed restrictions are in mph, so even officialdom hasn’t had the courage to face the hoo-hah that would follow an attempt to go metric. All very sensible. But when I’m weighed in hospital, it’s given to me in kilos – which mean nothing to me. Yes, I can ask for it in stones and pounds, but why should I have to ask?
And when it comes to buying stuff, as we all know, it’s a mess: beer and milk come in pints, but petrol comes in litres. As for fridges, cookers, wall-units - your guess is as good as mine. As for a kilo of apples - not a clue!
How could anyone have ever thought this would be a sensible move? We had traditional methods of measuring and weighing things which were applicable across the board, whatever you were dealing with. And then that grotesque arse Ted Heath came along, and it’s been a history of idiocy ever since.
If I lived in any other European country, I wouldn’t have had to cope with any of this impertinent nonsense: for them, nothing has changed. But I don’t. I live in the UK, where I’m basically George Orwell’s old prole inNineteen Eighty-Four complaining that a half-litre of beer is too little and a litre makes him wee.
I know I could learn all this stuff if I could be bothered – but I can’t. Because, while we’re always told that effecting changes to our mental landscape is about “helping industry” or “falling into line with our trading partners” or, simply, “because it makes sense”, it really hasn’t got anything to with any of those things. If it did, we’d have adopted the euro years ago - businesses love it.
No, the reason we’re regularly inconvenienced is that politicians and officials – the people our taxes pay for – will seize any opportunity to change things, because it justifies their existence by giving them something to do, and it makes them feel important.
Apart from dividing the generations and allowing the State to exercise more power, there are two main outcomes. First, as well all know, it allows greedy scoundrels – oil companies, supermarkets, Chancellors of the Exchequer – to squeeze more money out of us in the period of confusion that follows changes of this kind. And it means that many of us now live in a world that’s slightly off-centre, which doesn’t quite make sense: essentially, we’re living abroad. And they do things differently there.
This all parallels what’s happened in the sphere of morality. Broadcasters – the provisional wing of the political class - have decided that we should all accept foul language, attacks on the monarchy and religion, the denigration of anyone who doesn’t believe in the European superstate, the vilification of Middle England and all its cherished values, just as the nabobs of the Criminal Justice System have decided that shoplifting, burglary and mugging don’t matter as much as “hate crimes” and speeding.
Relax for an instant and the buggers will be in there rearranging our furniture, so we spend our lives mentally bumping into things that are no longer where they should be. Confuse and conquer! In themselves, none of these changes is earth-shattering: put them together and we get to live our lives in an off-kilter world from which familiarity and meaning are gradually being drained.
Six quid a gallon? You must be joking!
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